Just Enrolled! :) Curious About Housing, Dining, and Culture

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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Hi everyone! So I’m super excited to be attending the University of Chicago as a member of the class of 2020. I paid my deposit a week ago and have started to research housing. I have reviewed what is on the UChicago website extensively, reading what is listed about each residence hall and house (so I ask that no one link me to that on here because I have already read everything that is on the UChicago website). I was wondering if there are any current students (insider information) who can speak to living and culture in the following halls:

Burton-Judson (currently my #1 choice based on everything I have heard)

Snell-Hitchcock (currently my second choice)

I would love if someone could speak to the differences and similarities between these two halls.

Any and all things you know about the new North Campus residence hall being built that will open in 2016

I am really just looking for current student inputs (as they know more inside information about culture and atmosphere and living than the website can provide), but if any prospective students and/or alumni (recent alumni preferably, as they will be able to give more accurate info and inputs).

I also have some more questions:

What is it like living in a single at UChicago, and how does your residence hall affect that? (I am almost certain I want to live in a single.) And does the social atmosphere change as a result of the type of room you have?

In complete honesty, how are communal bathrooms? (This is something that is a bit of a turnoff for me, but I really would like to live in a single if possible, so could someone at the school just set it straight for me?)

How much does a particular house’s culture change from year to year? There are traditions listed on the UChicago website, some which I think I would enjoy more than others, but they also say that the people in the house make up the culture, so how much do the “traditions” stay traditions?

I’ll post more questions soon. Thanks in advance.

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BJ - Quirky
Snitchcock - Quirkier
Max P - Outgoing/social (lots of athletes and greeks)
South - Social (not as many athletes as max, but otherwise similar in culture)

The rest of the dorms seem to be a middle ground between the quirkiness of bj & snitch, and the outgoing and “normalcy” of max and south. I know spaces in north are being offered to satellite dorm students (blackstone, broadview, etc) first, so if their culture carries over then north will probably end up being both quirky and social (although proximity to the athletic facilities could make it slightly more like max)

I live in a suite in max and I love it. I picked a double/suite because I didn’t want my social life to be affected by living alone; my suitemates are some of my best friends and the same is true for most people I know who also live in max. I have some friends in singles in other dorms who really dislike the isolation, but also appreciate it from time to time. It’s really up to your own personal preference.

Communal bathrooms are honestly no big deal. My suite has it’s own bathroom so I haven’t experienced much of that here, but at boarding school we had communal bathrooms and after the first few days no one really even thinks twice about it. They’re also never super busy with people so if you’re shy you won’t have too many problems.

My house has a handful of traditions that not necessarily everyone participates in, but we all appreciate them and participate from time to time. A lot of house culture depends on the RAs of your house because they and the house parents will be the ones organizing events and everything; traditions do have a habit of changing from year to year but they stick for the entirety of the year. Also, many students move out of housing their second and third years so how essential is it really to your own expereince that traditions be longstanding??

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@tawsch Thank you so much for your information. It’s very helpful. So I’ll just present this scenario. If you had to make a bet, which would you say would be less of the stereotypical/normal kind of social, South or North (based on what you have heard about North)? Or another way of asking the question, do you think those middle ground dorms will chance their social behavior as a result of being consolidated into North? I’m not into partying and/or Greek life at all (and am not really athletic (i.e. nothing above intramural sports at most)) and would prefer to “socialize” through house activities, extracurriculars, and academics, so I don’t think I’m a good fit for Max P, but I want to craft a living situation that isn’t too intense (which is the feeling I’m getting about Snitchcock). I value privacy a lot (I love the idea of having my own room, just because I have a weird sleep schedule and other habits that almost certainly wouldn’t work with a roommate), but I don’t want to feel like I have no one to go to if I am ever just bored or something, and I don’t want to be a complete workaholic either.

Based on everything I just told you, do you think Burton-Judson would still be a good choice? And based on what I said, would North be a better second choice than Snitchcock? I think it’s pretty clear that those 3 at least are going to be my top 3 choices on the housing application based on what you said.

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@jarrett211 : A bit of parental advice: The differences between the dorms matter far, far less than you think, or than first-year students living in the dorms right now think. On the one hand, you, and everyone else, too, are actually very adaptable; you can probably make any living situation work for you, even if it isn’t exactly what you thought you wanted. On the other hand, in the end your personality is going to be the main factor in your social experience, no matter where you live. And here’s the big kicker: you probably don’t know exactly what your personality is if you haven’t spent a lot of time living with peers away from home yet. Many of the guesses you make about what’s going to be important to you will turn out to be wrong.

Also, I think for a lot of students, their houses seem super-important to them in their first quarter, but by their third quarter and thereafter the houses aren’t a big deal. Whether you love your house or hate it will make surprisingly little difference to your overall experience at Chicago.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t think about these things. Just don’t get too wrapped up in them. In terms of outcome you probably have about the same chance of being happy with the result – which is a pretty high chance, by the way – if you make your decision by flipping coins.

On some of your points:

  • If you're not going to put Snitchcock first, you maybe shouldn't bother wasting a choice on it. But if you have committed this early, you are likely going to get your first choice, so focus on that.
  • Being in a single in B-J doesn't mean being anti-social at all. My kid had a single, and was good friends with the kid across the hall. If they opened their doors, they were roommates, but they had the option to close them, too. It was a great situation.
  • I wouldn't worry (or hope) much about existing house cultures being transferred to North. There's a lot of turnover year-to-year, and every year at least half of a house moves off campus, probably more when the dorm is going away. And people change year to year when they are in college anyway. You can't really predict what the North houses will be like. And, in any event, you can only choose your dorm, not your house.
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@JHS Thank you for your insight! I guess I just haven’t had that experience for myself yet, and will figure it out once I get to the university. Based on your own experience, then, what would you say are the most important things to consider with housing, if as you say you can craft a great experience anywhere? Also, with Snell-Hitchcock, if I don’t include it as a choice, what would you suggest as an alternative residence hall that also has singles for underclassmen? Are there any?

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Don’t want to hijack this thread, but I have a related question - for anyone knowledgeable about the situation at UChicago, but most likely current students/recent graduates. Are residence hall assignments just for a student’s freshman year, or do they carry over to later years?

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@NotVerySmart It’s just for one year. They don’t carry over.

Source: Admitted Students Page Facebook Group

Also, hope to see you on campus next year! :slight_smile:

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International House has lots of singles.

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Actually, I think most students live in dorms for their first two years, and the ideal is that you stay in the same house for both years, and my impression is that’s still the norm, although there’s some opportunity for switching if you hate where you are. The dorm openings and closings the past few years have clearly disrupted that a lot, but it’s still the norm. Some people even stay in their house a third or even a fourth year, but by fourth year almost everyone still in the dorms is probably an RA in some other dorm than the one in which he or she “grew up”.

Historically, most people move to the fine off-campus housing in their third year. The university’s goal is clearly to become more like HYP, i.e., to house almost all students in dorms all four years, and probably to have them stay in the same dorm/house the whole time. But that goal isn’t likely to be reached for the class of 2020, or anywhere near it. The university only has dorm space for about 60% of the students, even after North opens, and not all of it is somewhere anyone would want to stay for four years. So most of you will probably still spend your third and fourth years living off campus (and liking it a lot).

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@jarrett211 Just going off your previous posts I would say you sound like a good fit for B-J. My child had a single there for her first two years and loved it. She lived on a single sex floor, so communal bathrooms were less of an issue.

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@jarrett211 Read this: http://housing.uchicago.edu/community_living/housing_assignments/room_changes/seniority/ It’s a bit of a pain to change from house to house, there needs to be a space open and current residents get seniority that builds up every quarter. Generally people stay in one house until they move off campus, though since you lose seniority when you go abroad, if people move back into housing after they were abroad they usually end up in whatever house has space and not their old house.

The people matter way more than any house tradition, and you’re going to find all types of people in every dorm. Since house placement is random, the people in each one are generally representative of the people in the dorm as a whole.

Dorm culture has less to do with reputations and more of a Jared Diamond-esque result of environmental factors. Max P is literally next to Ratner and everyone has a roommate, so that’s how it ended up being the athletic and social dorm. It wasn’t that people heard that Max P was the athletic and social dorm and moved in, athletes and people who wanted a roommate chose Max P.

Snitchcock is literally on the quad. It has a reputation that precedes it, but mostly it just gets the kind of people who want to live on the quad. Ergo they get a group of people that puts academic really high on their list of priorities, even by UChicago standards. Snell, which has all singles, gets tall he people who want to live in singles and also want to never be more than a 2 minute walk from their classes. Unsurprisingly, Snell people have a reputation for never leaving their rooms. I think Snitchcock’s reputation does affect the people who live in it far more than other dorms, but I don’t think it has as much of an effect as people make it out to be and I think this is the only dorm that the reputation has any more than a negligible effect.

I live in BJ. When I ask people in BJ why they chose BJ, I get, almost uniformly, that they wanted a single and heard South > Bartlett. Athletes tend to avoid us because we’re so far from the gyms, as do people who want a roommate, carpeted floors, or air conditioning. The quirkiness is almost always not a factor, it arises naturally from what kind of people tend to choose BJ or not.

etc. etc.

Regardless, dorm matters far less than you think. The same criticisms of Jared Diamond applies to the above theory - oversimplification, excessive generalization, etc. That only attempts to explain the stereotypes, not predict who you’re going to meet in each dorm. There are people who don’t like parties or athletics in Max P. There are people who do like parties and sports in Snitchcock. Filter for things that are definite (i.e. singles vs doubles, communal bathrooms vs suites, location) and don’t worry about things you can’t control, like house placement.

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@exacademic I don’t know. There is something about International House that doesn’t feel right to me. Maybe it’s just that I like older style buildings that are in good locations, and International House feels a bit isolated to me, so I don’t think I want to list that as one of my choices.

@JHS Other than space, are there other reasons most students move off campus for their junior and senior years? Is there something wrong with the dorms? I recognize these questions may be a bit premature, but I was just curious.

@Highbury Yeah, Burton-Judson seems to be the best fit for me (single, not too intense like Snell-Hitchcock, but not party by any means, great architecture, and great location (right next to dining hall, on midway, and pretty close to the main campus). I’m probably going to put that as my first choice. But I don’t know about the single-sex floor. Are co-ed floors’ communal bathrooms co-ed? That seems pretty bold. They don’t have separate bathrooms on co-ed floors in B-J? I’d rather not live on a single-sex floor (for obvious reasons), but wouldn’t it be really awkward to share a co-ed communal bathroom? Perhaps it isn’t, but I haven’t experienced anything like that. How does it work at B-J with communal bathrooms that are not on single-sex floors?

@HydeSnark Good to know! I guess I won’t look too much to the traditions when making my choice. If it is truly based on location, then Burton-Judson for me is an even better choice (for reasons I mentioned above). Also, I don’t mind walking five to ten minutes to get to my classes or the libraries, even in the cold (I’m used to the cold.). I absolutely do not want to live in a dorm that has a reputation for students never leaving their rooms and only focusing on academics. I want in general an academically-minded dorm (but perhaps it doesn’t have to have the absolute die-hard academics), where people socialize in the dorm in ways other than partying. In short, no parties, but I don’t want all socializing to come through academics. I think that is what Burton-Judson is, still really smart, but more outgoing than Snell. I am already going to be around brilliant minds hours and hours per day in classes and in the library. I think it would be wise to get a break. Am I giving an accurate guess of my perception of Burton-Judson? Also, how often do people leave their rooms to go and talk to each other and hang out in the recreation rooms (or whatever you call them) in Burton-Judson? If people who go there all say they want a single, what does being “social” mean in B-J?

And I am a bit confused on what you mean by the quirkiness is not a factor. I thought Burton-Judson was still one of the quirky and “UChicago-Type” dorms on campus (with Snell-Hitchcock just being the more extreme of those two)? Is that a misconception, or is that what you were trying to say?

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@jarrett211 : There are really only a few colleges where the majority of students don’t move off campus by their third year. Most of those are LACs that are (relatively) in the middle of nowhere, so there’s no surrounding community to absorb students. The rest are a handful of elite, wealthy universities that (a) have built a ton of relatively luxurious housing, (b) can charge below-market rates for it, and © are mostly in places where living off campus but within walking distance would be prohibitively expensive (like, say, Palo Alto, Cambridge, or the Upper West Side of Manhattan). Granted, most of those are competitors of the University of Chicago, which is a large part of why Chicago wants to change long-term, but Chicago (and Penn, and Cornell, and Brown, too, I think) is more the norm.

Anyway, from a macro point of view, of course students are going to move off campus if there are only beds for half of them (60% next fall) on campus. Duh. From the standpoint of individual students, however, I don’t think there’s anyone who wants to live on campus and is told there’s no room for you. When my kids moved off campus, they got much nicer space (at the very least a separate bedroom, a decent kitchen, and a decent common/living room, and ultimately when they found the right place much more than that) within easy walking distance for slightly less money than a bed in a dorm double plus a meal plan would have cost. They were living with friends, near friends. They affirmatively liked shopping for food and cooking; they ate better and much cheaper living off campus.

That was middle of the road. They could have saved a ton of money if they had gotten apartments that were less nice or had been willing to move sublet to sublet every quarter, or they could have spent a little more money and lived like royalty (lake views, modern kitchens, exercise facilities, proprietary shuttle buses, security guards). And as an added bonus, they could live there year-round; they didn’t have to move out for Christmas or the summer. (Not that it costs a lot of money to live in Hyde Park in the summer. Lots of students go elsewhere for the summer, so it’s ultra-cheap to sublet someone’s place for the summer. My cost figures were based on comparing 9 months of dorm to 12 months of off-campus rent.)

People living off campus can have a party if they want. But generally, it’s also calmer, less of a zoo. No first years throwing up on the stairwells. The university police patrol the whole area where students live.

Living in the dorms, you pay a huge price, in dollars and in lack of privacy and space, for the security guard at the door, the resident heads and resident advisors, the “free” internet, the sense that you are within a protected bubble. (That last wasn’t even applicable a few years ago, when a large percentage of Chicago dorm rooms were some or many blocks away from the main campus areas. But starting next year, all of the dorm rooms will be solidly on what is recognizable as “campus”.) Once you are acclimated to the place, once you know the ropes about picking classes and getting jobs and such, those extras cease to have any real value to you. Plus, all your friends are moving off campus, too. Do you really want to be a third- or fourth-year student living with a bunch of first-years? (The handful of fourth years who live on campus are mostly paid to do that, either as RAs, or as a requirement of a scholarship.)

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@JHS All very good to know! Thanks.

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Jarrett: Son is a 3rd year just moved into spacious, relatively nice apartment convenient to campus with 4 of his friends. He’s really enjoying it and it is not hurting his academics as far as I can tell. Moving into an apartment after the second year is a natural thing at UChicago, and the apartment market has evolved very well to meet the demands of the thousands of students (graduate / undergraduate) who need housing. What you see is apartments move from friend group to friend group. So in my son’s case, he and his friends took over an apartment housing a group of graduating 4th years who had overlapping interests with my son and his group of friends. Son and friends didn’t have to pay a security deposit; the leasing company just wrote the lease and off they went. The leasing company in some ways expedited the transition. There’s a symbiosis there.

I don’t think the Hyde Park apartment market will change dramatically even with the completion of the North dorm, at least for your time at UChicago. I could see the characteristics of the apartment market changing noticibly over the next 10-15 years, but it will take another North dorm sized construction to make a big change. I can’t imagine where that would take place. And there will always be those 10,000 graduate and professional students who need places to live.

I guess my point is that the 3rd year apartment exodus is not something to worry about but something to look forward to.

Dormitory living is good too. And Burton-Judson is a great dorm to be living in. You really are very close to the center of campus. You are also right there with the South dorm which means of course that you have immediate access to one of the two main dining halls. There’s even a “secret” passageway, apparently, taking you from B-J to the law school, which is also a pretty interesting, even historic, building.

All the best to you. Sounds like you will do well at UChicago.

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Is AC really that much of a concern? Also are there any dorms that should be totally avoided if possible?

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AC not an issue. School starts late September and ends mid June.

Don’t think there are any unacceptable dorms.

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Just will give my 2 cents view as a parent of a 4th year who still resides on campus in BJ, along with quite a few of his 3rd/4th year friends.

In large part of why my S chose UChicago (other than the obvious academics) was the opportunity to have a single and the chance to stay all 4 years on campus if he wanted. While it is true that many do move off campus after 2nd or 3rd year, plenty of his friends have stayed. The convenience of not cooking, grocery shopping, cleaning and a close proximity to campus outweighed putting too much effort into moving off. As he receives a substantial financial aid package, the cost to stay was not a factor. I think it might have cost us more if he did move off, but we told him he was always welcome to do so if he had wanted that experience. Obviously, he was lucky that several of his friends also stayed on campus.

Coed communal bathrooms seem to work out fine. The staff cleans them daily, and it is like sharing a bathroom with a sibling of the opposite gender. Most floors on BJ seem to have less than 10 residents sharing a bathroom, so it does not seem to be too crowded.S has said that he never has issues with getting a shower stall when he needs one.

He loves his single. He keeps the door open when he wants to socialize, or goes to the house lounge.The RH’s (resident heads) also plan plenty of social get-together’s for the house. It is great for when he wants to study and doesn’t want to trek to the library, he can play music or game on his desktop without concern of disrupting a roommate, and his weird sleep schedule doesn’t bother anyone else.

Not having AC is not a problem, but those last few weeks in May and early June can get hot. A fan or two is highly recommended.

Congrats, and welcome to the UChicago community!

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@jarrett211 I would recommend you do bj or south honestly; based on conversations I’ve had with current and incoming athletic recruits it looks like North will end up being more like Max than the satellite dorms.

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@jarrett211 you aren’t going to completely avoid parties in any dorm, even Snitchcock. And speaking as probably the most anti-party person I know here (and that’s really saying a lot), it isn’t a problem.

People go hang out in other people’s rooms/the basement/the study rooms/the lounges. The doubles are absolutely huge as well as any room on the top floor (either 4th or 5th depending on the house). How often people hang out depends on how much you want to, honestly. I spend most of my time in my friend’s rooms or vice versa.

BJ is a quirkier dorm but it isn’t quirky because all the quirky people decided to live there for its reputation. It just happens that people who want singles tend to be quirkier.